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AntiFa - Historical context

Bray points to antifascists fighting Mussolini, and cheers the fact that they “exchanged fire with Adolf Hitler’s Brownshirts in the taverns and alleyways of Munich and defended Madrid from Francisco Franco’s insurgent nationalist army.”

Bray neglects to mention that it’s precisely the Communist engagement in violence that helped to get the Nazis elected in the first place. Fear of the Communist Party’s bands of roving thugs helped drive support for Hitler’s supposed law-and-order restoration. The Nazis successfully played on fears of the Communists to great success. This is from Richard Evans’ book, The Coming of the Third Reich:

A graphic account of the life of the committed Communist activist during the Weimar Republic was later provided by the memoirs of Richard Krebs …Krebs later described how committed Communists would attend street demonstrations with pieces of lead piping in their belts and stones in their pockets, ready to pelt the police with …

Paramilitary battles were common; from 1924-1929, the Nazis claimed that 29 of their activists had been killed by Communists, and Communists said that 92 of their members had been killed by Nazis. Evans continues:

In 1930, the figures rose dramatically, with the Nazis claiming to have suffered 17 deaths, rising to 42 in 1931 and 84 in 1932. In 1932, the Nazis reported that nearly ten thousand of their rank-and-file had been wounded in clashes with their opponents. The Communists reported 44 deaths in fights with the Nazis in 1930, 52 in 1931, and 75 in the first six months of 1932 alone … Official sources broadly corroborated these claims, with one estimate in the Reichstag, not disputed by anybody, putting the number of dead in the year to March 1931 at no fewer than 300.

Communists did what Bray and Connolly would want: they attempted to break up Nazi meetings. That served the Nazi purposes perfect. Krebs was told to break up Nazi speeches by Hermann Goering, and he “made sure that each man was armed with a blackjack or brass knuckles … A terrifying melee followed. Blackjacks, brassknuckles, clubs, heavy buckled belts, glasses and bottles were the weapons used ... Hermann Goring stood calmly on the stage, his fists on his hips.” All of this gave the Nazis an image of solidity and self-defense they never could have achieved otherwise.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
- Robert J. Hanlon.

“There is a deeply anti-democratic undercurrent to much of the criticism of the new president, borne aloft by an assumption that democracy is too important to be left to the voters.”

And if a statue can oppress you, then I submit that you have greater issues. - A West.